Lesson #57 : The Cooks Butter Toast

There are several dozen small details that one must remember being a server. How to order dry toast correctly is one that I had not come up against until last night.

A well groomed Ukrainian gentleman sat down and ordered a T-Bone steak (medium well) and eggs (sunny side up) and dry white toast. Or at least that's what I thought I heard.

Later, upon receiving his meal he said he ordered dry wheat toast, but perhaps due to my inattention or the vagaries of accents I heard "whyt" not "wheet". One little phoneme misplaced and he is convinced that I can't get an order right.

Meanwhile I am trying to keep a table of four happy after a grown man spills his drink all over his mother while trying to read the menu and all the while I am running back to try to find out from the manager how much sodium per tablespoon our light Italian dressing contains for another pair seated at a nearby booth.

Back at the cook's window I ask for an order of wheat toast but I don't say dry wheat toast. I assume that's how toast comes: dry. But, lacking additional instructions, the cooks automatically butter it which I now unsuspectingly deliver to a completely disgusted customer. Why after telling me twice couldn't I deliver something as simple as dry toast?

But I don't feel bad about getting the toast wrong but instead at a deeply moral level: for heaven's sake, have we become so lazy that the cook has to butter our toast for us? Before last night it never occurred to me that someone else would butter my toast even before I thought about picking it up off of the plate. Just another detail this computer programmer never gave a thought to before putting on his apron.

At the register (which at PG13 we have to grab in-between taking orders, seating customers, and running food to tables) a table at which I have labored on and off for an hour with a woman, her adorable baby, and a doting grandmother comes to settle up their bill. They are all praises about the amazing service that I gave them and pleasantly the manager was standing right there to hear it. Apparently though, excellent service does not an excellent tip make--I only get $3 on a $25 order.

I don't know if I got a tip from the Ukrainian gentleman, but I do know that I get stiffed by demanding young pair who wanted to know about the sodium content of our salad dressing. And somehow that's fine. Blithe, young, and stupid yields no tip I figure is par for the course. But well-mannered, grateful and three lousy bucks? Waiting table is often a succession of petty insults. Truth be told I find the weirdness of it all humorous, perhaps because the experience is still novel. Will I retain that level of jocular indifference indefinitely?

PG13 cycles between doldrums and chaos--we had at least an hour early in my shift when there was only one table in use in the entire restaurant. Then parties start arriving and one of the three servers for the evening is on break and we are swamped. The high-point of the evening for me is one of the more difficult ones--at the counter, Lady Greymane (one of the managers at PG13) tells me to take a to-go order for two milk-shakes, then berates me (in earshot of the customers) for putting them in cups that are too big. The man and his daughter wait politely as I rush the two shakes out to them and then he calls me over, presses a folded dollar-bill into my hand and whispers "your hostess is an asshole." The other servers on this shift, Spunky and BigBrownEyes, both are delighted to hear this admirably pithy assessment of Ms. Greymane. When I get a chance to pass this juicy tidbit along they laugh and share some of their own gripes.

Somewhere during this shift, I think, I truly became a waiter.